


through this world below

by pigeonchest



Series: not supposed to come home [4]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Let Toph Say Fuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:34:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27706324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonchest/pseuds/pigeonchest
Summary: This place should feel familiar to her, this place where her ancestors are buried and where she spent years crawling around learning how to see. But it’s strange and it’s cold and Toph has a weird taste in her mouth and dirt on her knees.(toph, alone, relying on the kindness of strangers.)
Relationships: Toph Beifong & Iroh
Series: not supposed to come home [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1753861
Comments: 20
Kudos: 98





	through this world below

**Author's Note:**

> this follows directly from the previous installment in the series and prob doesn't make sense without reading the rest. this boy's almost got a plot now, somehow!
> 
> title from wayfaring stranger (there are 4000 versions of this song but i wrote while listening to the western massachusetts sacred harp version, which fucking rules.)

Toph has been alone in the Earth Kingdom countryside for about a day when she starts to think she maybe made a mistake. It’s not as though she could have stayed—given herself up to the mechanics of the Fire Navy bureaucracy, gambled to see who would end up in charge of her, waited for them to light all the memorial fires. No reason for all that. But as she shivers, stomach empty and feet cold, curled in a ball in the scratchy roots of a weird Earth Kingdom pine tree, she wonders if there wasn’t maybe some third option.

Toph is tough. Toph was raised by soldiers. She’s been on a boat far away from the comforts and luxuries of nobility for years, and it’s not like she’s been longing for those comforts either. This place should feel familiar to her, this place where her ancestors are buried and where she spent years crawling around learning how to see. But it’s strange and it’s cold and Toph has a weird taste in her mouth and dirt on her knees.

+

Toph lingers on the outskirts of the town where Uncle left her for longer than she probably should. The harbormaster must be looking for her, and probably others. Uncle was never quite clear on the exact official status of Toph’s residence on the Wani. Most of what Zuko did on the ship was done with very little supervision from the Fire Navy, except when Zuko got it in his head to be a nuisance (not infrequent) or some asshole midranked officer thought it would feel good to bully a prince (frequenter still). The fact of the matter is that Toph has no idea who’s actually on her tail. If anyone. So she sleeps in the lee of buildings on the other side of town from the harbor and steals the last of people’s winter preserves out of kitchen storehouses for a week, maybe longer. She’s already used to eating mostly pickles. She’s less used to sleeping rough, but better a random pile of hay than the too-soft, too-fancy bed in the harbormaster’s house.

Being in a town is weird. Toph isn’t used to the company of strangers. Plus she can never tell when people are looking at her, if their heads are turned in her direction because there’s something interesting behind her or if she’s the interesting something. The whole concept of hiding, of avoiding lines of sight—it’s just not for her.

Toph can tell when somebody changes the wanted posters pinned to a board in the center of town—or, she can tell whenever somebody stands there for a long time holding tacks and shuffling papers—but she has no way of knowing what the posters say. She can’t ask any random passerby about the notices either, on the off-chance that they look at the posters and say, “why lookee there, it’s _you_ wanted for a million gold coins on that there notice over yonder.” Or whatever a random peasant would say up here north of nowhere.

It feels, occasionally, like a game. Toph never had much reason to be sneaky before. All of the ducking around corners and stealing pies off window sills is fun, sometimes, in moments when Toph isn’t thinking of anything other than the adrenaline rush. And then Toph remembers why she’s doing what she’s doing instead of sleeping in her warm berth on the Wani and the stolen food turns cold in her mouth.

Once she gets cocky and steals a handful of jerky, left unattended in a basket on a back step for only a moment. A very short moment, it turns out, because the lady of the house comes back outside quick enough to catch Toph with her hands in the basket.

“What are you doing, you little rat?” the woman yells.

Toph yanks her hand back like the meat stung her. The basket topples when she does, scattering jerky across the dirt. She didn’t mean to do that.

“So now the Fire Nation can’t even keep their own brats fed,” the lady growls, lunging at Toph with a hand outstretched. Whether it’s to grab or slap Toph doesn’t know, and she doesn’t like either outcome. Toph launches herself out of the yard with a desperate stomp and a scramble of gravel. She doesn’t stop running until she’s halfway across town, and when she stops to check if anyone’s behind her all she can sense is the lady on her knees picking up Toph’s mess.

After that, Toph keeps to the winding alleys behind the kitchens of the big houses by the harbor, the ones that smell like lime leaf and bird chilis imported at great cost. Not the harbormaster’s house, but ones like it. The backsides of inns and taverns are good too, because nobody is paying any attention to those kitchens with all the bustle of sailors coming and going. Toph likes to be among sailors. Zuko’s crew was an odd bunch, but the rhythms of the navy are familiar even while Toph’s listening to them through a wall, up to her armpit in a bale of dried fish.

Soon Toph starts hearing talk around town about the retrieval of the bodies from the siege. About funeral rites. About how a member of the royal family might be coming to pay respects, to deliver Agni’s Blessing, to perform an audit. There’s only one member of the family who it could be. Toph never spent a lot of time with Azula back in the Caldera, but the memory of every moment she spent in the princess’s company sits itchy and wrong in her brain. So Toph leaves.

Toph picks a direction with no particular aim. Really, she’s just looking for _away_. So she nabs one last heavy crock of preserved something from somebody’s kitchen yard, turns her back to the harbor, and goes.

+

The stolen crock turns out to be full of pickled shoots, which Toph hates. Even though she took them from a Fire Nation kitchen they’re prepared the Earth Kingdom way with too much garlic and peppercorn, numbing-spicy instead of tasty-spicy like the Wani’s cook used to do. Toph eats them anyway, because there’s nothing else. She finishes the whole crock in three days, tries to drink the pickling liquid too but it makes her retch. She leaves the heavy ceramic container under a bush and twice almost doubles back to get it. It’s worse than useless, but carrying something feels better than walking empty-handed towards nowhere.

Hunger is strange. So is cold. Toph has complained of both before, really truly thought she felt them. But hunger was never more than a baby bird’s squalling, a quicker path to an early lunch, remedied by a complaint in the ear of the ship’s cook. Cold used to be even more remote when everyone Toph knew could start a fire with a literal snap of the fingers. Uncle ran warm, but Zuko was a furnace unto himself. He practically steamed at every step, and Toph could lay a cold hand on the body-warm plates of his armor and he would pretend he didn’t know it was there, preserving his dignity as she trailed behind him like a turtle-duckling.

Toph has no clue how to start a fire. Toph will just have to be cold.

+

The sun rises and sets, probably several times. Toph sometimes walks and sometimes shivers on the ground and all the time wrestles with how stupidly large the earth is. It’s even bigger, somehow, with nothing to distract her from it. Normally she’s juggling fifteen-odd heartbeats and all the shifting and turning and twitching of the associated bodies, and trying to decide the best way to trip Zuko on top of that. She’s never had time or attention enough for the whole entire breadth and span of the earth with no people on it. 

At first she sometimes gets lost in her own perceptions. Tree roots go so deep and branch so far, winding through the soil and around the stone and intertwining the whole time with the little, fiddly roots of smaller plants and the burrows of animals, sometimes with the animals inside digging or turning or just breathing, and the worms in the spaces in between and—Toph loses the daylight that way a couple times. There’s just so much going _on_ in the world, in places Toph kind of figured were dead.

Anyway it’s been five days of walking and two of no food when she senses the first sign of habitation since she left the place where Uncle dropped her. It’s just a tickle of something purpose-built on a distant ridge, dirt overturned and stone out of place. For lack of a better idea, she sets her feet in that direction. The only other option she can come up with is plucking leaves off trees to eat, and she’s not stupid enough to try that. Or hungry enough, yet, but she’ll get to that point soon enough.

It’s a town, Toph can tell once she gets closer. A small one. A village, even, a quiet handful of stone houses and kitchen gardens grouped together without even a gate on the road. Without a road either, actually. Toph is not an expert scavenger, but this seems like the kind of place where people will notice if you try to walk away with half their pickles.

Toph has no money, and only a vague idea of what to do with money if she had it. Living and occasionally shopping with Uncle only left her with a vague idea that all merchants are both cheats and potential friends, and the only way to tip the balance toward friendliness is to perform some kind of poetry-based magic trick. Most of Uncle’s way of meeting the world was both very confusing and extremely effective, and Toph has no hope of copying his special artistry alone on unfamiliar territory.

She’s entirely focused on scoping out the town in front of her, so she doesn’t notice the particular cold stone feeling that means running water or the strange lady washing clothes in the running water until it’s too late to avoid either one of them.

“Oh, shit,” Toph says, suddenly wet up to the ankles.

“What _happened_ to you, girl?”

“None of your business,” Toph snaps. The lady shrugs, keeps beating her laundry against the rocks without interrupting her pace even a bit. Like it doesn’t matter to her whether Toph is there or gone or drowned in the river, because either way the laundry will need to get done. It’s that type of sense that makes Toph a little more inclined to trust her. Toph steps backwards out of the flow of the water.

“I got a question for you, lady,” Toph says. The lady laughs when she says it, too quietly for Toph to hear over the rushing of the water, but Toph can feel how her shoulders shake. “Where am I?” 

“Just outside of Kailu. Not too far from Beihai.” That means nothing to Toph. It’s not as though she’s ever looked at a map. 

“Oh, right, duh,” Toph says.

“About a two day’s walk from the ocean, if that helps,” says the lady. Toph has been walking for five stupid days. She needs to get better at navigating on land, and fast.

“What’s your name, girl?”

Toph opens her mouth to say her own name, and then remembers once again that she has technically run away from the Fire Nation military. And that she has no interest in being identified by or returned to said military. “Jing,” she blurts out. “I’m Jing.”

The Wani used to stop at the same port on the Earth Kingdom’s southwestern coast every winter around the New Year, and that port had an inn that specialized in a particular noodle dish that Uncle liked, and the family that owned the inn had a cat-carp named Little Jing. It was a nice cat-carp. Toph feels okay about stealing its name.

“What’s _your_ name, huh?”Toph says.

The woman sighs, leaning back on her heels and draping the wet laundry over her arm. “My name’s Fan. And I got a daughter a little older than you,” she says. “Zhenzhen would never forgive me if I let you slip by without an introduction. And a bath, maybe.”

Toph freezes. She hasn’t spoken to a girl anywhere close to her age, or even been around one, in forever. Come to think of it, she hasn’t been around any women either. For the past three years it’s just been Toph, fifteen or so adult men, and one obnoxious teenage prince. (All dead now, says the little voice in Toph’s head that won’t stop reminding her how everyone she’s ever known has drowned in polar waters.)

Fan heaves herself up with the kind of weighty, painful unsteadiness that Toph associates with old men. She seems too young to suffer that kind of ache in her knees. “You good, girl?” she asks.

“Why did you ask my name if you aren’t even gonna use it?” Toph snaps.

Fan snorts. “Ah, you’re fine. Here, take these. Make yourself useful.” She passes Toph an armful of wet, heavy clothes. “I assume if you got through a forest without braining yourself on a tree branch, you’re okay to follow me to my house.”

“Duh,” says Toph, squinting in Fan’s general direction.

“With those eyes of yours I had to check,” Fan says, unbothered, and starts walking. She never actually asked Toph whether she wanted to come with. Toph has no better options. The laundry soaks Toph’s sleeves, the cold river water seeping through two tunics and pricking her skin. They walk in silence, Toph several paces behind Fan, towards the town on the ridge. They cross the river on a plank bridge that Toph also didn’t notice.

Fan leads her to a little stone-walled house on the edge of the town, the same as all the other little stone houses around it. There’s a person inside, somewhere between Toph and Fan in size, who must be the daughter Fan talked about. The girl inside is standing in front of a table, holding a knife with a dull, nicked blade.

“Found you a stray, Zhenzhen,” Fan says, relieving Toph of the pile of laundry. Toph stands empty-handed and damp in the doorway, right over the place where the stone floor goes cool with lack of sunlight. Zhenzhen stops whatever she’s doing with the knife—cutting ginger, most likely, by the smell—whirls around, and gasps.

“Mama,” Zhenzhen whispers, “she’s wearing _red_.” Shit. Toph forgot about colors. People are so picky about them.

“She won’t be once you get her some spare clothes, huh?” Fan prompts, shoving Toph further into the room with a no-nonsense elbow between her shoulder blades. 

“Mama,” Zhenzhen whispers, more forcefully, “her _eyes._ ”

These people are as subtle as avalanches. “What about my eyes?” Toph snaps. “Have you never seen a blind person before?”

Zhenzhen just shakes her head. Toph’s close enough to pick out the motion easily, but she waits silently until Zhenzhen realizes what she’s done.

Zhenzhen jumps. “Oh! You can’t—no, I haven’t seen a blind person, I guess.”

Toph sniffs. “Me neither, but I’m not being rude about it.” Toph couldn’t help the joke, and it lands like a rock.

Fan sighs. “Zhenzhen, come on. Get to it.”

Zhenzhen drops her knife with a clatter that makes Toph wince and seizes Toph around the shoulders. She rotates Toph in a slow circle while Toph thinks about opening up a very small pit in the floor right under Zhenzhen’s feet. A very small pit, exactly Zhenzhen-sized. Fan wouldn’t even notice if Toph did it right.

“Your hair,” Zhenzhen gasps. “You poor thing, when did you last comb it?” 

“I dunno,” says Toph. Usually she let Uncle comb it and then just wrapped it up into a topknot and some buns with the leftover hair at the nape of her neck, and all the crew knew better than to say anything about it. She hasn’t touched her hair since Uncle last combed it, though now it has some dirt tangled in it. And it’s still in kind of a topknot shape, somehow, even though the ribbon got lost days ago now.

Zhenzhen clicks her tongue. “Come here, come here, let me fix you up.” She grabs Toph again and manhandles her down onto a stool in front of the cooking fire.

“She isn’t a doll, Zhenzhen,” Fan calls. 

“I _know_ , Mama,” Zhenzhen calls back. “A doll would have much nicer hair,” she mutters under her breath. Toph snorts. The house has a dirt floor, and she keeps her feet firmly planted. Better to keep an eye on things. Metaphorically. Fan hovers just outside, doing something strange with the wet laundry. Almost like she’s dropping the clothes into thin air, and they’re just disappearing. It takes Toph a minute to realize that she’s laying them out over bushes outside the house. On the Wani, there was always a firebender on laundry duty to steam the water out of the clothes. There wasn’t enough spare space to let clothes _sit_ until they were dry.

Zhenzhen sets in on Toph’s hair, combing and yanking and tugging. The air in the house is still and smoky and warm, and if it weren’t for Zhenzhen trying to pull her scalp off Toph could almost fall asleep. Some time passes in combing before Zhenzhen pauses. She sucks air through her teeth and works the comb out of Toph’s hair.

“Mama,” Zhenzhen calls. “Come see.”

“I’m busy, Zhenzhen,” Fan yells. “Unless somebody somehow lost a limb since I came out here.”

“Come _look_ ,” Zhenzhen says, and Fan sighs and does. She comes around to stand with Zhenzhen behind Toph. There’s another tug on Toph’s hair, and Fan whistles slow.

“You’ll need to cut it,” Fan says, matter-of-fact. 

“No,” Zhenzhen whines.

“No!” says Toph. It’s not done. Not an option. Toph never cared much about Zuko’s fixation on honor, but—not an option.

“It’s tangled real bad, little sister. Nearly got some mats in there. A cut won’t kill you.”

“ _No_ ,” says Toph, reaching back to touch whatever problem Zhenzhen found that apparently can’t be solved except permanently. There’s a snarl under her fingers, individual hairs tickling the skin. She can sense the dirt in it, thinks about stiffening her wrist and bending it right out, but she can already tell there’s no way to do that without ripping the hair, too. She takes her hand away, and Fan comes back with a kitchen knife. The sound of cutting hair is unlike anything Toph has ever heard.

When it’s finished, there’s piles of hair at Toph’s feet, so insubstantial that she can’t tell it’s there aside from the itch on her skin. Fan goes back outside and Zhenzhen fixes up what’s left of Toph’s hair as best she can. Two neat braids, one on either side of her neck, the tails just brushing her collar.

“Do you know how to braid?” Zhenzhen asks kindly. “I can show you how to do it. It’s pretty easy to do on yourself.”

Toph doesn’t say anything. Zhenzhen takes her unresisting hand and weaves it through the over-under motion. “You’ll get the hang of it. I can help you until you do.”

+

Toph gets a bath (unpleasant, cold) and some of Zhenzhen’s hand-me-downs (itchy, probably green) and an instruction from Fan to start pulling her damn weight if she wants dinner, too.

“What do you mean you’ve never fetched water,” Zhenzhen squeals on the way back from the well. Her voice is so high and bright it gives Toph a headache. Toph is all wet for no reason for the third time in a day, and mad about it. Her hair keeps brushing against her neck in a way she doesn’t like. The tunic Zhenzhen gave her is too small in the armpits and the pants are a weird loose cut that flows strangely around her legs. Toph would like to sit down facing a wall with her hands over her ears and her feet up, but instead she’s doing Zhenzhen’s chores.

“I just never have,” Toph snaps, pulling harder on her side of the bucket so Zhenzhen has to scramble to keep it balanced. “Lots of people haven’t, it’s normal.”

“I’ve been getting the water since I was big enough to carry the bucket,” Zhenzhen says. “All the kids around here do. Mama always says she has too much to do to sit around waiting on me hand, foot, and finger.”

“Nobody ever _waited_ on me,” Toph lies. “But on the—where I lived before, we didn’t have a well, or all these stupid steps to follow or heavy shit to lift. It was just in the damn cistern.”

Zhenzhen sniffs, tugging on the bucket handle. “Don’t be so crude.”

“You’ve never even heard crude,” Toph says, thinking of Helmsman Shen, who could say dirty shit about people’s mothers in the dialects of four different islands, though Toph wasn’t supposed to know that. Helmsman Shen promised her that once she’d practiced enough at her calligraphy he would teach her a really good one where the pun only worked in writing.

Fan is crouched in the yard when they get back, shelling peas into a basket.

“Mama,” Zhenzhen says, wrenching the bucket out of Toph’s hands completely, “Jing has never ever fetched water before. She didn’t even know how to take the cover off the well.”

“Don’t tattle,” Toph hisses.

Fan just hums. Her heartbeat kicks a bit, for no particular reason that Toph can tell, but she just keeps shelling the peas.

They give Toph a meal and a straw pallet to sleep on, and she lies awake that night with a stomach ache and her palms pressed flat to the dirt floor. She doesn’t know where to go from here. There’s no one possible next step that makes more sense than any of the others. Toph doesn’t know how to make decisions. She has a feeling that Fan would make them for her, and Toph wouldn’t even have to ask. 

The next morning Zhenzhen goes to fetch the water and leaves Toph behind in the yard because she makes it take longer. Toph has no issues with this plan until Fan comes up behind her, hands on hips, and makes a bone-chillingly disapproving noise.

“What am I gonna do with you, Jing?” Toph can tell from context that _feed Jing and let her take a nice nap_ is probably not an option.

“I’m an earthbender,” Toph says. “I never had a master or anything, but I could dig a hole or something, if you needed one.” She shrugs. It’s a little odd to just say it outright—the biggest open secret of Toph’s life, dropped at the feet of these mostly-strangers. It’s ordinary to bend earth here. It’s not dangerous.

Fan hums thoughtfully. “You ever tilled a garden plot before?”

Toph doesn’t know what that is. “I could do that,” she says.

“Uh huh,” says Fan. “Go right ahead then. Till away. Your help would be much appreciated.”

Toph is mostly sure she can tell where the plot is, at least. Mostly. She steps over to where she’s pretty sure grass ends and plot starts, digs her toes in, and thinks. Food, she supposes, must have to come from somewhere. She’s never had any reason to consider where, exactly, or how. Apparently it involves _tilling_.

Fan takes pity on her. “You’ll want to mix up the soil, y’know. Loosen it up and turn it over. See how there’s all that dead stuff from the winter on top?”

“Can’t see shit,” Toph mutters, and Fan snorts.

“Well, believe me that it’s there, girl, and believe me that it needs to be mixed into the dirt. Zhenzhen and I would normally do it with hoes, if that helps you picture what I want from you.”

Toph considers. She digs her feet in further. She hasn’t really bent much with soil—actually bent it instead of just waiting and watching with soil as her medium—since she was a little kid back in Gaoling scrabbling around under bushes in the ornamental gardens. It’s not pure like coal, and it has less good solid stone in it than even the most amalgamated rock. But Earth is Earth, even if it calls to her in a different voice. So she stiffens her spine, settles into a firm horse stance, and breathes her chi through her arm bones, blades of her shoulders down to the tips of her fingers. With a heavy sort of exhale and a sudden cold, deep smell, all the soil in the plot turns over at once.

“Was that good enough?” Toph asks.

“Shit, little sister. What was _that_?” Fan says.

“I tilled it! If that wasn’t tilling, it’s your fault for not explaining it good enough!”

“Oh, you tilled it. You tilled the absolute life out of it. Pretty damn good for a kid who can’t even see what she’s doing.” Fan leans down over the plot, tapping her heels together to get rid of a little loose dirt. With a twitch of her foot, Toph puts the dirt back.

+

That night, after Toph has systematically removed all the stones from the top two feet of soil everywhere on Fan’s property and stacked them into a neat cairn by the door, the three of them gather in front of the fire. Zhenzhen leans her head on her mother’s lap, humming a tuneless little song that only makes Toph think of Uncle and his flat, sweet voice. Toph sits with her arms around her knees, barely listening. Eventually Zhenzhen droops, her breath slowing, and the house is quiet for a while.

“I don’t know where you came from,” Fan says. Her voice is as stern as always but quieter. The low cooking fire crackles in front of them.

“That’s cause I didn’t tell you,” says Toph.

Fan snorts, jostling Zhenzhen’s head. “You didn’t have to tell me. I can make my own guesses. I don’t need to see burns to know what’s obvious.”

Zhenzhen breathes on, steady and loud. 

“You can stay,” Fan says. “Unlike some, I don’t look down on little ones for shit they can’t control. You’d have it easier than most anyway, with your bending and your looks.”

Toph doesn’t really know what she means. Her looks have never been her concern. “I’m not that little,” she says. She’s twelve, not a baby.

“Those people back where you came from, they don’t want anything good for a kid like you.”

Uncle’s warm hand on the back of her neck after a bad dream. Zuko’s strange, stifled laugh. Fire flakes, made special for her in the middle of the ocean because she’d never tried any before. The fear in Zhenzhen’s voice on the word _red_. The big, silent absence of any men in any of the houses in the village. 

“You can stay.” Fan slides a hand over Zhenzhen’s hair, down to her ear. It’s the only tenderness Toph has sensed out of the woman. “You should stay.”

Toph has been stealing Fan’s stern hospitality for two days. It’s been four plain, hearty meals and a night curled up on a spare straw pallet in front of the hearth, a foot from Zhenzhen’s steady sleeping heartbeat. Toph has no real way to pay that back when all she has to offer is free labor, but she promises she’ll remember it when she goes. That’s what she’s thinking as she leaves that night with Zhenzhen’s old clothes on her back. Better to be alone and in debt than paying it back with lies about where she came from to make a rude old lady feel better about her charity. Better to be alone and keep her memories to herself. They’re nobody else’s business.

She makes a badgermole out of one of the stones she pulled from the garden and leaves it in the doorway when she goes. Sharpens the knives, too, just to be polite.

+

It’s dark when she leaves Fan’s, but that’s no concern of Toph’s. It’s dark and the earth is cold and alive with animal movements, and for about the millionth time in the last three weeks of Toph’s life, she has absolutely no idea where to set her next footstep. At least she’s wearing green now, for all that’s worth. Toph bites the inside of her cheek and prepares to take another bold step in no particular direction with no destination in mind and no one to meet her once she gets to not-there.

She walks through the night, thinking on her position and her next options. Toph didn’t like stealing that much, and misplaced pity didn’t work for her either. The next option, then, is good honest work. That sucks, but it’s worth a shot. Toph’s list of marketable skills is very short. Shorter if she’s really trying not to let anybody know that she’s technically nobility, educated personally by a Fire Nation prince. She’s recently discovered a distaste for farm labor, but that’s not all she can do with earthbending. And earthbending is safe. 

Soon enough she comes up on the outskirts of another town, busier and bigger than the one she just left. Kailu, maybe, if she’s remembering Fan’s day-old explanation right. There’s enough small bustling movement of the washing and fire-banking variety that Toph’s mostly sure it must be almost dawn, so she sits down at the edge of the trees surrounding the town and gets to work. If she’s going to survive she needs money, and if she’s going to get money she needs something to sell.

It takes a good ten minutes before she has a selection of rocks she’s happy with. Three of them are bigger than her fists with a simple, sturdy texture, made of all the same thing just like coal and cooperative because of it. With those, she makes two badgermoles and a moose-lion, careful to draw out the textures of fur and bone. The fourth stone is more interesting: a river rock with a sleek, elongated grain. Almost without thinking of it, Toph coaxes the rock into a slithery shape familiar from Uncle’s tea table.

Probably nobody this deep into the Earth Kingdom wants to buy a statue of a dragon. So Toph shoves the statue inside her tunic and reties her sash tight over top of it. It’s nestled over her stomach, right against the warmth of her skin. It’s better luck anyway not to have four statues on display. She gathers the rest of her work in her arms and heads into town.

Kailu isn’t big enough for a proper market, but Toph does find a narrow street with a few other vendors setting up for the day. She picks a spot far enough down from them that they can all happily ignore each other and settles with her back against a sun-warmed stone wall and her feet planted firm on the road. She arranges the statues in front of her in a way that hopefully looks nice to buyers, trying not to wish that she had a blanket or canopy or sign, anything to make her look more legit.

Toph waits. Toph listens. People come down the street and never pause for more than a half a second in front of her. Toph waits for so long that the sun gets close enough to the center of the sky for Toph’s spot to pass into the shade. She pulls a paving stone up from the road just to have something to do. The dragon under her shirt jabs into her ribs no matter how she sits.

“Shameful,” says a woman walking by, like Toph is deaf as well as blind, “making a poor little child sell your wares for you.”

“It’s a tactic, really,” says her companion. “The more you pity the kid, the more you pay. She probably gets a cut.” 

Toph stiffens. “Hey, nobody’s making me sell my own work,” she calls after them, dropping her rock.

“Your work?” the second guy says with a hint of laughter in his voice. This guy is an asshole. Toph would really like to huck one of her badgermoles at the back of his neck. Instead she picks one up, holds it up towards the sun, and erases it back to plain stone with the littlest flex of her wrist. 

“Fine then, what would you rather see?” Toph has some appreciation of showmanship. You can’t live with Fire Nation royals and not get a pretty good sense for the dramatic. With as little visible effort as she can manage, she pulls the rock into a fluid parade of shapes—bird, fish, beetle, back to bird. Just crude outlines, none of the really juicy detail and texture, but enough to be plenty impressive from where her two observers are standing.

The preachy one gasps. The asshole shuts up, so Toph really knows it worked. Toph grins.

“Come on,” she says, “I can take requests.”

The pair takes a step towards her. “Gimme a dog-deer,” the asshole says, followed by the special flinch-and-grunt that follows getting elbowed in the kidney, which Toph knows well.

“I can do that. Watch if you want, I don’t care.” This is terrible service. If Uncle was here, he would shake his head and put his hand on her shoulder and say her name in a politely concerned tone. But Uncle isn’t here, and anyway he would still think it was a little funny. Toph cracks her neck, settles her heels and hipbones into the dirt, and gives the rock she’s holding antlers. For a moment she gets so lost in the movement of chi and the tiny internal pressures holding the rock together she forgets that she won’t eat if this guy doesn’t like his dog-deer. Or, well. She’ll eat, but it will be much more complicated now that she’s been sitting in the street making herself recognizable as a rude urchin. With a final clench of her right hand, she polishes off the pads of the dog-deer’s feet and holds it up for inspection.

“Not a bad trick,” the guy says. “How much?

“This is high quality craftsmanship,” Toph says. She didn’t think this far ahead. “Ten,” she guesses.

“That much? Are you blind _and_ crazy?”

Guessed wrong, then. “You’re paying extra for the show,” she says, stubborn, yanking the statue back. The guy sucks air through his teeth.

“Two. At _most_.”

“Nine.”

“Shut it. Three.”

“Fine!” 

Toph holds out a hand for the coins, waggling her fingers. She counts all three out carefully, passing them between her hands and feeling the chips of metal. The guy takes his stupid dog-deer, rubbing a finger over the fur on its snout.

“Pretty good,” he says.

“Spread the word or whatever,” says Toph.

“Spirits bless you, child,” says the guy’s companion. Toph very politely does not gag.

+

The guy was apparently paying attention when Toph said to spread the word, because through the morning Toph gets a trickle of interested customers. Not too many, but enough that Toph has to pull up another paving stone or two to keep her supply of rocks steady.

Her customers like to chat while she works. Not with her, or course. It’s like they’re pretending she doesn’t have ears. But they talk to each other endlessly and they say absolutely nothing interesting. Lots of chitchat about the Fire Nation’s movements, and none of it is _I saw the exiled Fire Prince this morning behind my woodpile_ so Toph doesn’t care. Somehow the network of gossip in a little Earth Kingdom town is even less exciting than the rumors on a ship where they only got news once every other week by messenger hawk.

She makes a variety of animals on request. Nothing too exotic—two chicken-cows, an eagle-trout, another badgermole. Some kid asks for a bison. 

“Never seen one of them,” Toph says, idly cracking apart a stone and smashing it back together. Nobody laughs.

“Like the Avatar’s?” the kid says. “He was just here two days ago. Bought provisions from my dad and flew right on south.” The kid sounds proud, raising his voice in case there’s anybody on the street who hasn’t yet heard about his little claim to fame. Toph reins back the urge to spit.

The little empty place in Toph’s chest, the place which she’s been carefully ignoring in case it hurts to touch, blossoms into sudden hot anger. If it weren’t for the Avatar, for that stupid little airbender, Toph’s life would be normal. Toph wishes he had stayed dead. Toph wishes he would die again for real. 

“No bisons,” says Toph. She’ll make this kid a gopher-bear and he’ll like it.

By the end of the day, Toph has enough coin to pay for a proper meal or two. Or three, maybe, Toph has no earthly clue how far fourteen coins will take her, but it’s enough to be heavy and inconvenient tucked in the hem of her stolen tunic. She packs up when the other vendors on the street do and wanders down the streets of Kailu looking for a place where she can learn about the value of money. Any bustle that the town might have had in the heart of the day has already settled down, and the place is quiet. Toph smells hot oil somewhere nearby, though, and she lets her nose lead her in that direction. 

The source of the smell turns out to be a noodle cart parked in a mostly deserted little plaza. It’s the kind of place where there might have been a market if Kailu was a different kind of town. But now all it holds is a dry well, the noodle cart, and a skinny, dusty boy leading an ostrich-horse. The boy stops to talk to the noodle seller and something in Toph’s brain shifts like an egg cracking. She’s so full of sudden hope she might puke.

He smells different. He weighs less. She’s certainly never known him to hunch over like that, with armor or without, and she doesn’t know where the hell he got the ostrich-horse. But any uncertainty fades away when she runs directly at him and launches her whole body weight right at the dead center of his ribs and he catches her like it’s nothing with a familiar raspy yelp of surprise.

**Author's Note:**

> i thought about how to make this make sense in terms of travel time and then i thought actually fuck that, the earth kingdom is as big as i feel it is, in my heart. also if somebody wants to come crouch like a gargoyle on my desk and gently shut the laptop on my hands whenever I start writing another oc, the position is open.


End file.
